Postcard exhibit at the MFA provides look at wartime propaganda

Jody Feinberg The Patriot Ledger

Saturday

Aug 18, 2018 at 3:01 AM

Remember the pleasure of receiving a scenic postcard from a traveling relative or friend, before smartphones made that a rarity? If you were alive during the two world wars, you may have received not just travel postcards, but propaganda ones.

The exhibit “The Art of Influence: Propaganda Postcards from the Era of the World Wars” at the Museum of Fine Arts is a revealing look at what made these diminutive examples of artistic graphic design so powerful. They were perhaps the first modern examples of "fake news."

“One of the things that make them so useful as propaganda tools is they carried simple messages on the front that were clearly stated and visually interesting,” said curator Benjamin Weiss. “They dashed through the mails in much the way that tweets and texts zip between people today.”

By organizing the exhibit by themes and methods across nationalities, Weiss exposes the similar approaches propagandists used to influence perceptions and opinions. While not pointed out in the exhibit, the parallels to today are many.

“There is no better moment for this exhibition…,” said Leonard A. Lauder, whose collection provided material for the exhibit. “Though produced decades, some even a century ago, the messages and designs still grab our attention, and in them we see the roots of propaganda strategies employed today.”

The exhibit is accompanied by the book “The Propaganda Front,” which inspired co-author Weiss to create the exhibit of 150 postcards, as well as posters and film clips.

Though roughly just 5-and-a-half-by-4-inches, the cards conveyed strong messages. Mostly lithographs on card stock, the postcards were cheap to produce and purchase. From World War I through World War II, these colorful and dramatic cards were widely dispersed by the Germans, Soviets, Italians, Spaniards, British and to a lesser extent Americans.

“This period is a significant movement in graphic art in the early 20th century, and it’s a mass medium that has largely been forgotten,” Weiss said. “Propaganda gets into people’s consciousness and they stop thinking about it as propaganda when they’re constantly surrounded by images that are reinforced.”

One of the most interesting sections is "False Narratives," with German postcards intended to make people think of themselves not as losers of the war their country started, but as victims of the unfair treaty imposed by the Allies, the Treaty of Versailles. The cards "Unfair," one in English and one in German with Germany surrounded by guns, make the case that Germans should feel threatened by the Allies, not the other way around. One German card was created to convince Americans that the Allies unfairly took land from Germany: it shows the post-war Polish corridor through Germany to the sea and an imaginary Canadian corridor through Boston. It asks “What would you say if the United States of America were to be treated in this way and made to look like Germany does on the accompanying map?”

These images shaped how people perceived their lives and their country, promoting views of reality unsupported by truth. The connection to today cannot be missed.

“Think about how people are framing stories for you,” Weiss said. “If you don’t care that much about the facts, you can create false narratives.”

Some Nazi postcards also are powerful and disturbing. One of the most surprising cards is a photograph of a German-American Bund rally of 20,000 people on George Washington’s birthday Feb. 20, 1939 in Madison Square Garden and another of the same rally with a giant cardboard figure of Washington stood on stage. With their uniformly raised arms, the participants look exactly like those in the adjacent postcard of a 1938 Nazi rally in the Austrian city of Graz. The American anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic rally was called “Mass Demonstration of True Americanism.”

“They wanted to spread the idea that Nazism was a universal movement,” said Weiss, who said the card was printed in the U.S. and captioned in German. “The figure of George Washington was intended to say that Nazis held American values.”

Arranged in the section “Us,” these cards and others sought to have citizens identify with Nazism, Communism or Fascism, the three major political movements of that era, and convey the idea that proponents could make these movements dominant if they worked together. Other examples are the 1935 Roman card "Opera Balilla" of figures in the Fascist Youth Movement and the French card "Europe Marches Against Bolshevism" featuring blocks of identical marchers holding national flags. A series of German cards with blond, blue-eyed, smiling youth promoted membership in Nazi-sponsored youth groups, required for all non-Jewish children ages 10 to 17. The 1931 card "The USSR is the Shock Brigade of the World Proletariat" shows Stalin leading a parade of workers holding signs in languages from a variety of countries.

Across from “Us” is its opposite, “Them,” where the enemy is depicted as monsters, beasts, fools, and cartoon characters.

“The intent was to dehumanize them, so they don’t seem like people,” Weiss said.

The 1942 American card "Just a Little Something to Remember Pearl Harbor" looks like a comic book image, with sailors firing cannons toward and sinking ships bearing the Japanese flag. The Soviet card "Capitalist Spider" shows a fat man wearing a tuxedo surrounded by mounds of gold coins.

In the 1940 German card "For We are Setting Off for England," Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill are foolishly oblivious to the German invasion by air, peering out to sea as German soldiers parachute from planes. The 1941 Soviet card "Santa Claus (Fake)" depicts Hitler holding a toy bag that holds only war, death and hunger.

A series of postcards of leaders from different countries shows unmistakable similarities. Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Gen. Douglas McArthur all stand upright, chests thrust forward. Other cards show how they used history to emphasize their legitimacy. The 1930s Spanish card "The Leader" shows Fascists holding flags associated with the Spanish monarchy, and the 1930s card "German Saviors" shows Hitler shaking hands with Otto von Bismark, who united Germany into one country in 1871.

To convey the message, symbols, such as the V for Victory, and flags were important images. Repetition was important and some postcards were also based on posters, such as the 1915 English recruiting poster "You are the Man I Want." Also important were images of people uniting to defend their country, such as the 1917 American postcard "Red Cross nurses marching in a war parade."

The early use of propaganda films also is on view in an eight-minute series of film clips, whose filmmakers used many of the same approaches as post card designers. All the clips are historic, except for a brief hidden camera footage of Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, whose words about using propaganda to conceal the truth are as true today as they would have been during the World Wars.

Reach Jody Feinberg at jfeinberg@patriotledger.com. Follow her on Twitter@JodyF_Ledger.